MPC Live 2 vs Push 3 Standalone (w/ Live Suite)

The Lounge Other Gear
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Update after three weeks of use: things are starting to become clearer to me.

The Push 3 is still buggy, the buttons are still annoyingly stiff and hard to press, and I’m still slow with it. But it sounds. So. Darn. Good. Playing with those instrument presets and effects is meditative and I’m enjoying the use in bed despite its massive weight and size. The usb-c charging is a really welcomed feature that means I can sit down anywhere and almost always have a power cable within reach.

I have so much to learn and I’m annoyed by the way it doesn’t invite you to jam on it without careful planning on the computer first. For example, you can’t easily set up the eight encoders to control your choice of device parameters from the Push itself. Jamming out of the box means a constant switch between clip and play layouts and you easily get lost. Even if you map things to the mod strip, that stops working in clips view for example.

But as a music making device, it works. You can easily record automation across clips one device at a time.

The MPC, on the other hand, makes live noodling and jamming easy. You can quickly switch the q-links to Project mode and assign them to any parameter and explore how eg opening up the filter of the pad while bringing down the drum program sounds like. It’s just a faster user interface in general, almost every feature is a (soft and easy) button press away.

… But it just doesn’t sound nearly as great. When sketching on it, I keep thinking “I’ll replace this synth sound with something else down the road” and it’s harder to get a feel for the overall vibe of the track as a result. The reverbs are about as hard to work with as I remember from last time I owned it. They work for sketching, but they will surely be replaced once exported into the daw.

I think if your primary workflow is to sample from real instruments, records, and to use keygroups, the MPC makes much more sense. But for me where 90% of the music is synthesis based and I have zero interest in hooking different hardware together, the plugins it comes with simply leave some things to be desired. TubeSynth is decent and arguably matches Drift (almost), but Hype feels like a far cry from Wavetable. What a remarkable synth that is. The rest of the synth lineup on the MPC have less value to me, Odyssey is fun as a replica of a 70s synth but doesn’t exactly produce “modern” sounding presets and feels like a bit of an unnecessary overlap with TubeSynth as two predominantly subtractive synths.

That leaves you with the choice of keygroup sampling from the daw or, if you think it’s worth it, paying for the soft synths to get even more flavors of subtractive synths or an FM synth. And I’m sure in the future they will charge for a better reverb too.

As currently written, it sounds like the Push 3 is the obvious winner for me but the jury is still out and the MPC still has a clear edge in workflow, portability (hilarious when considering its size but it’s still noticeably lighter and smaller than the Push 3) and overall immediacy (another fun thing to write when considering the overall sentiment of the modern MPCs but they are immediate and very easy to build muscle memory on).

I’m actively making music on both and have decided to keep both until at least April next year to give both a fair shake and competition before making up my mind. I’m unlikely to keep both.

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83

Yeah the way the MPC sounds from its effects to its instruments all sound a bit bland to me. Always feel like I’m taking crazy pills when people describe the modern MPC sound as punchy… like is it punchy or do you just have the volume loud? Workflow was fine except for the reliance of the touch screen. I’d probably get along more with the X but that thing is hilariously massive imo.

But really for me it just kept coming back to “why am I doing these things outside of ableton and bringing them into ableton when I could just domain ableton?” And that goes for Maschine as well, which I think has the best workflow of all three devices but NI seems to have abandoned it and the majority of the effects and instruments built into Maschine+ are over 10 years old, as NI has always rather sell you a new synth or effect than update what the Maschine has natively.

Anyways, got off track there, Push 3 isn’t perfect but it’s my favorite option and the quality of the effects and synths with Ableton far surpasses what’s on the other two. At the end of the day no one cares how a beat was made they care about how it sounds and I want to start with a good sounding spot rather than have to fix it later.

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Well to be fair, I think the MPC does sound punchy! That word, to me, implies grit and dirt, and there’s plenty of ways to achieve that with samples on the MPC. The distortions, tube emulators, amp sims, lofi bit crush etc - those effects all sound great to my ear and I love being able to quickly dial in some of it on a percussive sample.

Where the MPC sound comes short to me is in the “smooth”, “lush” or “pristine” department. The reverbs are quite harsh with unpleasant echos and resonances. The synths, while great sounding on their own, just aren’t particularly “modern” sounding.

But the thing is, it’s a matter of taste and musical preferences. I make electronic music taking inspiration from trance and adjecent genres, and also ambient, etc - in my opinion, all those genres benefit more from “lush” than “punchy”. If I were more into, say, hiphop beats, or if I routinely recorded acoustic instruments into it, I think the MPC “sound identity” would make a lot more sense. The reverbs are perfectly adequate if you just want some more “wetness” to a recorded sample. The spring reverb sounds good if you’re into that sound. For drums, I have zero issues with keeping all the wet plugins active when exporting. But for a lush synth lead or pad in an ambient track, I feel I’d be crazy if I didn’t export it dry and replace the wet part in the DAW.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the signal path of the MPC. The talks about converters or those lying about lack of headroom are just wrong in my opinion. Besides, I don’t care about it because I export digital stems anyway. I don’t care if a noise floor is at -98 dB or -97 dB as long as the digital signal path is decent. The MPC lets you export in 48 kHz, that’s all I personally need anyway.

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85

Right, and I’ve had that feeling in the past but to me the answer is clear: I find hardware and the interaction with it to be an important part of how I make music. I sit in bed and I play an instrument with my hands. It’s slower, and it’s meditative, and it’s more fun. If I could do it all in the DAW, I would sit with the laptop in bed instead. But I’ve tried and it’s not nearly as rewarding - to me.

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Yeah I dunno. It doesn’t sound bad but then I load samples into my S2400 and it’s punchy without having to apply effects. There’s more of an actual character from the sampler itself. MPC is much more neutral which might be better for most people and in most cases but when I compare that sound to the the way things come out on the S2400 it’s night and day.

I definitely don’t think it’s necessary to have a nearly $2000 sampler that technically does a lot less, but there is definitely a difference where I’m not having to smother sounds in effects just to say it’s punchy, it just naturally sounds that way.

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That comes down to taste and personal preference. I’d much rather dial in character than to not be able to remove it.

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I mean, at the end of the day sure it’s all up to preference. My point is more that I want a sampler with character or I might as well use my computer. If I have to use effects to get “punchy” drums on an MPC I have far better effects in ableton.

People use old MPCs because the specific sound they offer, the new MPCs don’t have that and I don’t find the emulation modes (which can’t be manipulated in anyway, mind you) to be extremely accurate, especially with the SP-1200 mode which I can physically compare.

But yeah, having analog filters that can be driven on the input and output along with a unique sampling algorithm really does give a fantastic sound, the S2400 is often sighted by people here as the best sounding sampler and it’s definitely spoiled me cuz when I use other things they sound boring and miss the glue the S2400 has.

Which just comes back to: if I want neutrality I’m gonna use a DAW / Push 3 cuz it offers better sound quality. Workflow is important but a big second important factor to me behind the way something sounds. And for me the MPC didn’t do it for me in the sound department (or the workflow for that matter, lol).

But yeah, obviously everyone has their own wants and needs.

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I own all three and fwiw I do think the modern MPCs sound punchy and a lot nicer than the 1k that I had previously, but tbf not that far removed from what you’d get from a DAW or the Push 3. There’s a fair element with all of these that what you put in is what you get out so careful sample selection and processing is key.

The S2400 yeah does just have that sound, but it’s the one I use least because I kinda hate the sequencer and usually just sequence it from my computer. So for me it’s pretty much a special effect a lot of the time - brought in at the end to add flavour to drums or samples I’ve already worked out elsewhere.

The MPC I like a lot but I don’t find that I’m that productive with it, tend to go down a rabbithole of chopping samples and nudging events to try to get the groove just so, which is a lot easier to do in the computer by moving things around and/or using quantise or warp.

If I could only keep one it’d be the Push and it wouldn’t even be a discussion. It’s far more than a groovebox, it’s a proper instrument and capable of being configured to support a million different ways to create music - having full max integration is the cherry on top.

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90

Another update four months later…

It’s April and the pendulum is swinging back towards the MPC. Two new realizations that I thought were worth sharing here:

MPC as a plugin is amazing

I’ve had a bit of an epiphany with the MPC recently by giving the MPC-as-a-VST route another spin now that I’ve switched from Reason to Ableton Live. The plugin now works flawlessly! This puts one of the main reasons for buying the Push on its head: to avoid having to commit to printed audio stems at a definite point in time when leaving the MPC and transitioning to mixing in the DAW.

The idea with the Push is that you don’t need to make that hard commit since it’s already an Ableton project. But with the MPC plugin, you don’t need to do that with the MPC either!

All things you programmed into the MPC project still works, including automation lanes and all soft synth settings. If, later in the mixing process, I spot a problem with a sound, I no longer have to apply complex dynamic EQ or other fixes over the audio stem - instead, I can simply go into Program Edit on the corresponding Program on the MPC and fix the underlying problem. Or if I wanted to change a note in the melody, I no longer have to use the Warp feature to transpose notes on the audio stem - instead, I can simply edit the underlying MPC sequence.

I can even continue to navigate the underlying MPC project using my MPC Live 2 in Controller Mode and it’s literally like having a hardware interface for a VST. It’s so brilliant that it feels like magic!

Sound design

The other thing I’ve realized is that, while the synths are still definitely simpler and less interesting sounding on the MPC, they are far easier to interact with than the Push counterparts.

Somehow the Push interface doesn’t feel very immediate in general and I keep getting lost in all the parameter pages. Especially deeply complex sound presets which tend to be built around layers after layers of effects that are grouped and macroed in such a way that you need to spend significant time deciphering it to understand how to tweak things. The modularity is a great concept if you take the time to build your own sounds in Live and design things just the way you like it. But on the Push, you can’t do any of that, at least not quickly/easily, so in practice the Push becomes a preset machine because configuring those effect racks on it is a pain, and changing macros doesn’t work at all. Many of the presets are really nice sounding though, I just personally don’t enjoy preset browsing much at all.

And even when tweaking the core synths without performance macro groups, they just don’t feel very consistent and easy to navigate. Plus, I still can’t get over how stiff those buttons are, this makes me sort of feel angry when paging between parameter views to find the one I’m after.

The MPC synths, while much less advanced, feel way more straightforward to design sounds on, except for the ARP Odyssey which is deliberately designed to look like the 1972 original. In general though, you pick a synth preset and you can quickly see how it was built because there are no complex routings or nested effects to consider. Or you load a Program (i.e. a synth preset + insert effects) and since it’s limited to the same set of four inserts on the Mix page, it’s still easy to understand how the sound was built.

Conclusion

There is no conclusion yet. I need to spend at least another four months to explore both more deeply to understand which one of them to keep. Or maybe I’ll end up keeping both. The music I make on them are different from each other and I still very much appreciate playing on those MPE pads on the Push and those sounds are amazing. Let’s see how things play out after summer. :blush:

In the meantime, I’ve finally taken the time to publish one of our MPC tunes on our channel.

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91

I think rather than a vs situation for me it’s really more a why not both.

If you can afford the luxury of having multiple boxes that cross over and do very similar things in different ways. I tend to go to very different places with the MPC or Push, which are different again to the Digitakt, or using Ableton/Bitwig to feed my S2400 and S3000XL.

I did think for a while that the Push would replace all my samplers and probably a bunch of other gear into the bargain, and probably it could. But I like having options.

The main counterargument for me is that the bandwidth necessary to learn so many pieces could be better spent on actually making music, but I find them all pretty intuitive.

With the possible exception of the S2400, which I still find a bit inscrutable except as an adjunct to my DAW. But one thing I haven’t explored at all with it is the looper functionality, which could end up being its niche - seems like a bit extravagant to just have it sitting there and only coming in to play to colour samples I’ve already worked up in the box. It does sound so good though.

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Pushing notes with touchscreen is just as bad, its not as smooth as an Ipad or even a mid range Android screen.

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Totally agree with this, and it’s been my thought process too.
Ableton and MPC, as platforms, have very different feels to me and lead in different directions, which is something I value.

I also think about the bandwidth thing too, which is why I label them ‘platforms’ and commit to only having TWO of them… EVERYTHING else I own is ultimately a sound source fed into these two platforms, and that allows me to justify the gear I like to keep/use that is full-production capable (Elektrons, SP404mk2, Hapax, Keystep Pro, MC707, TR8S, etc, etc…).

I’ve also not fully taken to the Push 3S, but it offers enough as a companion device to Ableton where I can justify keeping it, and feel like it’ll probably be updated in the next couple of years where I’d probably regret having let it go.
And, as much as the MPC can frustrate me at times, it’s still a majorly positive experience overall, and an environment that I always enjoy going to as a counterpoint to Ableton (and vice versa).

So, that’s how I can justify keeping both the Push 3 and MPC.

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94

I didn’t like push 1, push 2 and push 3
Just a computer works better for me.
M+ feels like only made for sales. They did marketing but have forgotten development.
Mpc live2 gave me the best experience.

The standalone version seems more important for akai than the computer version.

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That’s been on my mind too, but ultimately I concluded I’m ok with the creation of my masterwork compositions being delayed by an unspecified amount of time, in exchange for exploring what each device has to offer in its own right.

I too have experienced different results programming a song into MC-707 vs. the same song on M8 Tracker, and have come to expect the same on Push 3 and the just-acquired Syntakt.

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I’ve never tried to program the same song on different devices, but I definitely approach them all differently. That’s a really cool way to learn a new device.

I agree with this. I’d have a hard time articulating how exactly, but the music I’ve been making on Push - even when it’s just sequencing my other gear - sounds very different than the music I made using my MPC. Just like the music I make on my Syntakt is completely different from the other two (and, arguably, is even more different from Push/MPC than the Push and MPC are different from each other).

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It’s definitely true for me too. I guess it’s a combination of the workflow it invites you to take with them. And yes, the Syntakt leads to unique music whereas both the MPC and the Push gravitate more to the kind of music I’d make in the DAW. All three lead to distinctly different outputs.

I may end up keeping all three in the end…

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I think these are both smart ways of looking at things. A lot of what I’ve been doing in the past six months is about reconfiguring my process away from trying to create a track from start to finish in a single DAW project or hardware session, which has never really worked out very well for me, and instead having a constant process of generating ideas and material to feed into the platform for creating actual music from all these elements, in my case this is Logic.

I took a lot from a post on another board from someone who’s far more experienced than I am talking about having phases of “gathering” (capturing and generating sounds, clips and harmonic/melodic/rhythmic ideas) to “preparing” (putting these ideas in a format where they can be developed and mixed and matched together) to cooking (putting together an arrangement in a coherent format that I’m happy with and might potentially even be enjoyed by other people).

I see identifying samples or loops, generating sounds or presets or riffs or longer jams in VCV, Bitwig, Ableton, plugins or the modular … and even guitar these days … as the gathering phase, where chopping and building up sequences whether in samplers/Push/MPC/DAW is more the preparation than cooking phase, with the final piece being to commit and bounce stems to go in to Logic for final seasoning and presentation.

I was also listening to an interview with Four Tet on Jamie Lidell’s podcast where he talked about having monthly folders going back for years with samples, found sounds and fragments that he can constantly adds to and can draw on.

Something of a tangent here, but I guess it makes a big difference what role you see the tools playing in your process. For me it’s slowly starting to come together but probably still a bit away from seeing if it will really work out.

Either way, I wish I’d really put some thought in to this years ago rather than jumping around between pieces of gear and software thinking that the answer was just to find the “right” one, when in reality their respective strengths all can contribute. I suppose the upside to that is that after this process I’m reasonably competent across a bunch of tools and can enjoy just messing around in various ways to see what comes out, even if the next steps take a while longer to figure out.

And somewhat back on topic fwiw I think the MPC touchscreen is basically fine, for me it’s definitely not worse than trying to chop samples in Koala or Logic on the iPad, even using an Apple Pencil. I regularly wish my other gear had one, especially the S2400.

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Touch screen response rate is lower, it’s a thing. But I’m not talking about chopping, I’m talking about editing in grid mode.

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Editing in grid mode is painful, but honestly editing in P3SA clip view is painful too. If you didn’t have to change modes to select notes on MPC I think it would just be flat out better in that regard. As it stands it’s basically a wash.

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IMO #1 most frustrating thing about edit notes on force/live is when trying to lasso/select the notes to select them but then having the screen scroll away up or down gahhhhh :crazy_face:

Wish there was some way to to temp disable screen scrolling when getting close to the edge

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